I have a coworker, Mary, who is in the Army reserves. Last April, she was deployed to Iraq. She really wanted to stay in touch with her students and we agreed that it would be a wonderful experience for our students to be able to interact with their teacher who is also a soldier serving our country over seas. Since I have all of the same students in my science classes that Mary had in her English classes, I offered to be the go between with her and the students. We looked online for a good way to keep in touch and found Skype. We created an account and Mary left for Iraq. Every Friday, at the end of the school day (which was the start of her morning), the students and I had a Skype session with Mary. It was a very educational experience for the students. We used the microphone and webcam for the most personal experience. They were able to see their teacher dressed in her uniform and were able to interact with her from another continent. The best part was that the cost was only 2 cents a minute. You would never be able to make an international phone call for such a cheap rate. Skype allowed us to not only talk to Mary but to see her and see her surroundings.

          Since I just returned to work last week after my maternity leave and Mary is still in Iraq, I plan to begin our weekly sessions again as soon as possible. This is just one example of how we could use this technology with our students. In my case, this was a fellow teacher but any class could “adopt” a troop and have the same kind of interactions with one of our active soldiers. Another way we could use this technology is to arrange for class collaboration with other classes across the country. One of my coworkers has a friend who is a teacher in South Carolina. One time, he and his friend connected their classes through Skype after both had completed a unit on the civil war. The classes were able to have a discussion together about the war which was interesting because on classroom was in the north and the other in the south. One other way I could see using this technology is for training purposes for teachers. I am new at co-teaching this school year. It was something I was just thrown into last minute with very little training. I think it would have been very insightful to be able to use a technology like this to observe a well established co-taught classroom at another school.

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